Please check out the Center for Teaching+Learning Enhancement website for all of the information about the Faculty Professional Development workshops planned for March 23. Dr. Bob Noyd will deliver three interactive sessions in the Spindletop Room of the Gray Library. Contact the CTLE staff if you have any questions. The annual Assessment Conference was very informative on many fronts. The LU team was a little concerned because we made our presentation at 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning. Much to our surprise and delight, we had a full room. If you are involved in assessment in any way, this conference would certainly be beneficial to you. We at the CTLE carried the banner pushing for closer ties between the assessment and faculty development folks. The Windsor-Oakland University Teaching and Learning Conference, themed Moving Beyond the Traditional Classroom: Engaging Students Through Experience will be hosted this year by the University of Windsor May 19 and 20. Experiential learning – a broad term that encompasses service learning, community-based learning, situated learning, and many other active learning strategies – has long been recognized as a powerful way to engage students, deepen understanding, and help create the conditions that enable students to transfer what they have learned to new contexts. They are presently accepting proposals around this broad theme until February 28. Have you ever been approached about teaching a course online? Chloe Yelena Miller offers some insightful advice and notes that more than one in four students took at least one online course in the fall of 2008.

Have you ever thought about creating a classroom charter agreement with your students? You should include a mission statement that can be drawn from your teaching philosophy, clearly defined roles and responsibilities, expectations related to performance, ethics and conduct, and a list of the consequences that describe the action to be taken (usually on a progressive scale). This works really well in classes that have team-based activities. By entering into an agreement with your students, everyone assumes responsibility for creating a class that focused on learning. Bob Noyd's visit to LU on March 23 is shaping up nicely. He will present three interactive sessions in the Spindletop Room of the Gray Library. We should have the specifics posted early next week on the CTLE website. Speaking of upcoming events, Rebecca Cox, who will be visiting LU on April 15, has a terrific book, The College Fear Factor: How Students and Professors Misunderstand One Another. You can borrow it from the Ron Lewis Library. We encourage you to integrate some of the chapters into your classroom this semester as Dr. Cox is planning to engage in dialog with faculty and student groups during her visit. The annual assessment conference at Texas A&M begins on Monday in College Station. Drs. Tom Matthews and Todd Pourciau along with Robyn Hesse will be presenting and participating in this forum that focuses on assessment best practices and tools that can be used to enhance student learning.

Bloom's taxonomy continues to be the theoretical framework used in critical thinking enhancement training. On March 23, Bob Noyd will be discussing this in his session on how you can enhance your student's critical thinking abilities. The interactive workshop will focus on specific techniques you can implement immediately. The faculty professional development day all happens in the Spindletop Room of the Gray Library. More specifics will be released soon. Diana Chapman Walsh, former president of Wellesley College, in a brilliant essay highlights the recent trending interest on learning about learning. She notes, "The new measurement regimes are responding, as well, to demands from accrediting and regulatory agencies for convincing data on value-added educational outcomes. But educators know that assessing what students have learned is far less valuable than finding out how they learn." We are always on the lookout for new and useful evaluation rubrics. A colleague from Lynn University shares the rubric used in a variety of instances including but not limited to: descriptive, expository, analytical, and persuasive essays, public speaking and oral communication, power point presentations, and creation of electronic resources (like a wiki page). MERLOT and the Sloan Consortium invite you to submit a proposal for the 4th Annual Emerging Technologies for Online Learning International Symposium, to be held July 11-13, 2011 in San Jose, CA. The deadline for the call for papers has been extended until Monday, February 21, 2011. The theme of the conference is “Empowering Next Generation Teaching” and is designed to bring together individuals interested in the review and evaluation of online teaching and learning technologies.

Excitement is mounting for the visit of Dr. Bob Noyd, who directs the Center for Faculty Development at the Air Force Academy. He will be delivering three different workshops on March 23 at LU. We are working on the meeting logistics so visit the CTLE web or this blog to stay informed. Governor Rick Perry has issued a challenge to all of the Texas high education community. “Today, I’m challenging our institutions of higher education to develop bachelor’s degrees that cost no more than $10,000, including textbooks,” said Perry. The discussion logically starts with online learning. According to Inside Higher Ed, the book on online education is that while it increases the capacity of classrooms and eliminates the costs associated with buying and maintaining buildings, high-quality online courses are costly and require substantial upfront investment; instructors have reported that teaching well online often is more time-consuming than classroom teaching, and high-quality delivery platforms are expensive. Have you tried to incorporate active teaching methods in your mathematics classroom yet? A colleague shared a helpful site, that is somewhat dated but filled with useful information, that was created by the Texas Collaborative for Teaching Excellence. We found the Professional Development Module on Active Learning to be very informative. Just a reminder that you can still register for the free webinar The Next Big Thing in Digital Education: The Blackboard and McGraw-Hill Higher Education Partnership. This presentation will begin at 1:00 p.m. on February 17.

According to a Chronicle of Higher Education analysis of 10 public four-year institutions in Texas (including Lamar University), business majors and education majors are typically exposed to only a handful of writing-intensive courses—fewer than five out of the 40 or so courses needed for a degree, on average, for business majors, and fewer than eight courses for education majors. By contrast, history majors typically take 14 courses that require 10 or more pages of writing. Kyle Boudreaux, Center for Distance Education, shared with CTLE that Blackboard 9.1 has an anti-plagiarism feature called SafeAssign. Faculty can submit all of their student's work to check for plagiarism and receive a report, usually within a few hours. The recently published book Academically Adrift by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa has created quite a stir. They will be participating in a Live Chat with the Authors session on Monday, February 14 at 3:00 p.m. You can join the conversation and share your thoughts on how we can create better learning opportunities for all students as well as if you agree or disagree with Arum and Roksa's assertion that for many students, four years of college make little difference in their ability to write and synthesize knowledge. Go ahead and save March 23, 2011. Dr. Bob Noyd, Air Force Academy, will be on campus all day giving a series of talks on faculty professional development. Watch the CTLE website for more information.

If you are in need of some inspiration today, I would suggest that you listen to the video by Taylor Mali on what it means to be a teacher. He describes himself as a poet and has created the New Teacher Project to "direct 1,000 people into the field of teaching through poetry, persuasion, perseverance, and passion." Well we did get snowed in at the Southwestern Educational Research Association meeting in San Antonio last week. We should all be very proud of the terrific graduate students from Lamar University who made presentations at SERA. In talking with other participants, LU made a big impact. An interesting story in the Chronicle of Higher Education tells us that to help reduce the number of dropouts in freshman biology courses, professors at the University at Buffalo have turned to the power of collaboration and cloud computing to build an online teaching tool designed to explain concepts better than a textbook can. They have turned to a tool called Pop!World to visually present the topic of evolution. The hope is that it will visually engage students. “Teaching from a text gets boring to them,” says Dr. Bina Ramaurthy, a research associate professor in the department of computer science and engineering. I hope you are planning to join the Lunch+Learn on plagiarism tomorrow in 108 Setzer Center. You can visit the CTLE website for more information.